Mind Sprocket: The Back Page : Simplicity and the Industrial Revolution

I hesitate to write a lengthy post, but can’t help but share what I’ve been reading and thinking about lately.

First is “The Jungle”, by Upton Sinclair, that book I carried with me to Starbucks, a book that focuses on life during the Industrial Revolution. Second is Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden”, perhaps remembered most as something many of us had to read in high school. But I’ve returned to it years later because of one word repeated throughout that has always stuck in my head: simplicity.

The themes of these two books, contrasting in nature, are still relevant today. We still live by the terms of the Industrial Revolution. We can make 200 in a day? So why not push harder and make 215? Why should it be impossible? If we can do it, we should. Bigger and better is always best. Etc, etc, etc. Let’s work ourselves to the bone, and make as much product and money as we can. At the same time, people want to return to the old and familiar, the simple. Organically grown food is not such a new thing. Neither is writing by hand, or walking or biking instead of driving. And yet people are returning to these things with fervor as a means to escape what it is that they so strongly desire, more.

These books were written 100, 150 years ago, and still carry in them ideas that are still churning around today. It’s amazing, it’s relevant, and it makes me glad that I’m not reading only what’s on the current bestsellers list.

“Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. “

–Thoreau